Re: Science, Social Science, and Empirical Inquiry

Reply to Mike Alexander (reg. latest installment of Science, Social Science, and Empirical Inquiry discussion)

Sorry for the delay, but I wanted to make sure I had a good section of time to devote chiefly to his response.  I really do believe M.A.’s latest posting(s) here - both on this and the topic of “persuasion” - were quite good and that I am fairly impressed by his answers and questions in each of them.

Specifically, on the “S,SS, and EI” matter, I wanted to say the following:

I agree that science is a social activity, and that it is by coming to a consensus or an agreement on things that are real/true that the field progresses.  I’d also agree that “science does not follow some “scientific method” that if applied in isolation by a lone genius will discover the secrets of the universe.”  That’s fine.  However, sometimess it takes a generation or two for a good, workable idea to catch on and for one’s work to find acceptance with peers.  History, as in the history of knowledge, is ultimately the verifier of scientific propositions/observations, then comes the verification of predictions and demonstrations, and then follows finally the importance of more political elements of majority opinions on scientific issues for a given generation.  Without the other two elements, majority viewpoints on Science issues don’t count for much.

I think the paragraph about a “real way things are” is good.  Problem is, to go to the John Nash example you used, the roommate isn’t real because he’s not there in this given bit of space and time.  He may be alive and perhaps fully physical in Nash’s own mental sphere, but not within his environmental surroundings.  The fact that he’s not real is not due to the political/social agreement we have about his not being real or “real to us”, but to the fact that we cannot show objectively and empirically/factually his being there in a given physical time and space.  (The same is true for the real tiger Hobbes in the Calvin and Hobbes cartoon strip, as opp. to the merely inanimate stuffed animal tiger that C. carries around with him)  The politicized social activity of science is important, but it doesn’t and can’t trump the other important components of the discipline; that is, it can’t do the proofs, it can’t completely validate the real, and it can’t by itself stand the test of time and the demonstrable proof of History -> without any other of these other essential components the majority opinion of scientists in a given generation is just a passing fad.

The “key is utility” but only to a certain fractional degree.  Yes, the idea of reality works, but it works regardless of whether we say or believe it works for us.  Reality external to us, our common visions, beliefs, and conventions may indeed be meaningless in a experiential-conceptualized, psychological sense, but only until such point when we die and our life (lives) is/are brought to a halt.  As a poem that I heard when I was a youngster has it:

Here lies the body of Jonathan Hay

Who died disputing the right-of-way

Though Jonathan was right

And the Law was strong

He’s just as dead as if he’d been wrong.   

Yes, this response of M.A.’s is a very good one and for the most part I can agree with him on much of what he says.  But ultimately “persuasion” in the scholarly sense isn’t advertisement marketing, science is more than the socio-politics of scientists and a politicized intellectual variant of faddish majority rule, there’s a world of epistemological vision beyond Utilitarianism and Pragmatism, and finally, the proof of Science’s validity lies in the History of Knowledge and empiric/empiriological demonstration of the “real way things are”, not in whether we think that they are.

Would the world go on if human vanished from the earth?  Yes, for ultimately the question’s not so meaningless.  Bambi and his friends could care less whether we stayed or went.  The world would go on; As the REM song has it; “It’s the end of the world as we know it … I FEEL FINE.”

Good conversation here.  I hope people are finding it both enjoyable and useful to their researches.  All the best!

Luke R.

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